by Larry Tagg
The flight from Lincoln sped outward from Washington. Correspondent Whitelaw Reid, listening to the people as he traveled from Cincinnati to Maine during July and August, became convinced that Lincoln’s reelection was hopeless. Another prominent man confirmed Reid’s pessimism in a letter to Elihu Washburne: “Things in a political way do not look so favorable as they did some time ago,” he warned. “Pennsylvania, New York, and all the New England States are getting down on Old Abe as they call him.” John Hay wrote to Nicolay from rural Illinois, telling him, “everywhere in the towns, the Copperheads are exultant and our own people either growling & despondent or sneakingly apologetic.” Edgar Conkling of Cincinnati believed that in late July most Republicans were for Lincoln only “from pure necessity” and eager to “get a competent, loyal President, in the place of our present imbecile incumbent.” General John H. Martindale reported from Rochester, New York, “The present condition of public sentiment is most unfavorable to the President… . [I]n this region the President has lost amazingly within a few weeks, and if the public sentiment here affords a fair indication of the public sentiment throughout the country, the popular suffrage to-day would be ‘for a change.”’ From New York City, a friend of General Butler confided, “I have seen and talked with nearly all the leading men in the city, and they all are of one opinion in regard to Lincoln. They considered him defeated.” Another prominent New Yorker wrote to Montgomery Blair:
Political affairs in this state are assuming a very unfavorable aspect for the Republican party, and unless some prompt action is taken, we will be unable to carry the state for Mr Lincoln… . [S]o great a change has taken place that if the Convention was again held, Mr Lincoln would not be re-nominated.
According to Lincoln’s good friend Carl Schurz, “The people seemed to be utterly spiritless… . The administration party could not have been in a more lethargic and spiritless condition. Its atmosphere was thoroughly depressing.” Gideon Welles confided to his diary a “feeling of despondency … . Wide discouragement prevails.” A. K. McClure wrote later, “Distrust and disintegration were common throughout the entire Republican organization and nearly all of the sincere supporters of Lincoln were in next to utter despair of political success.” Leonard Swett sketched the mood in a letter to his wife, writing, “I found the most alarming depression possessing the minds of all the Republicans, Greeley, Beecher, Raymond, Weed; and all the small politicians without exception utterly gave up in despair.” “Unless material changes can be wrought,” Swett wrote, “Lincoln’s election is beyond any possible hope. It is probably clean gone now.” The men closest to Lincoln used the most desperate terms. John Nicolay called it “disastrous panic—a sort of political Bull Run.”
Newspapers across the North were quick to take up the story of Lincoln’s fall from grace. The New York Herald declared, “The feeling against Old Abe is daily increasing.” Richard Smith, Republican editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, told his readers,
The people regard Mr. Lincoln’s candidacy as a misfortune. His apparent strength when nominated was fictitious, and now the fiction has disappeared, and instead of confidence there is distrust. I do not know a Lincoln man, and in all our correspondence, which is large and varied, I have seen few letters from Lincoln men… . [T]he nomination of a man that would inspire confidence and infuse a life into our ranks would be hailed with general delight.
Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune wrote to John Hay a letter that the young secretary described as “inconceivably impudent, in which he informs me that on the fourth of next March, thanks to Mr. Lincoln’s blunders & follies, we will be kicked out of the White House.” Horace Greeley, whose trembling finger he himself always considered to be on the American pulse, declared:
I know that nine-tenths of the whole American people, North and South, are anxious for peace—peace on almost any terms—and utterly sick of human slaughter and devastation… . I firmly believe that, were the election to take place to-morrow, the Democratic majority in this State and Pennsylvania would amount to 100,000, and that we should lose Connecticut also.
Many newspapers, moving with the tide, cast off completely from the President, such as George Wilkes’ New York Spirit of the Times, whose parting shot read:
Under the figure of a jester, he is essentially a despot, and we may as well resign ourselves either to anarchy, or submit to imperialism at once… . He should gracefully resign… . It would be better than the fight of one hundred thousand troops, and would entitle him to the lasting respect and gratitude of the entire nation.
Others to quit Lincoln were the New London (CT.) Chronicle, the New Yorker Democrat, and the Suffolk (NY.) Herald, which announced its defection tersely: “[W]e determine him a man not calculated for the times—-too easy, forbearing, and of short sight. We need a man of sterner stuff, and possessed of deeper penetration.” Another was the Boston Pioneer, a German paper, which left the Lincoln camp sneering that he “has brought even honesty into disrepute.” Another German sheet, Indiana’s Westliche Post, likewise deserted the President, writing, “the only way to redeem the State for the Republican party would be to throw Lincoln overboard.”
The Democratic New York World savored the spectacle of the President’s demise, reprinting an editorial from the Richmond Examiner: “The fact … begins to shine out clear,” it announced, “that Abraham Lincoln is lost; that he will never be President again… . The obscene ape of Illinois is about to be deposed from the Washington purple, and the White House will echo to his little jokes no more.”
Greeley privately concurred with the Examiner. “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten,” he spat. “He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow.” That Greeley and his bitterest Republican enemy, Thurlow Weed, who opposed each other in everything else, agreed in this gloomy prediction testified to the breadth of the feeling against Lincoln.
Earnest letters sped from every point on the compass to men whose blood quickened with the desire to replace the faltering President as the nominee. There were calls for a new convention to name a new man, someone who could win in the fall. As early as August 6 discontented groups in Ohio met to consider how to prevail on Lincoln to drop out of the race in order to hold a new Union caucus. They were answered on August 14 by a powerful circle of over twenty party leaders in New York City, including Greeley and Henry Winter Davis, who met secretly at the home of jurist David Dudley Field. They agreed to form a committee to urge Lincoln to withdraw, and meanwhile to privately circulate a call for a new convention to meet in late September “to concentrate the union strength on some one candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.” Three days later a friend of one of the hopefuls, General Ben Butler, wrote to inform him of another meeting, to be held at New York Mayor George Opdyke’s:
Chase will be there, many prominent men are invited… . I had an interview with Weed to-day of two hours, and it was very satisfactory. He says he thinks Lincoln can be prevailed upon to draw off. [Lincoln’s friend Leonard] Swett … is of the same opinion. Weed says Lincoln told him substantially that he would not be in the way of success. Swett goes to Washington to-morrow night to tell Lincoln that it is the judgment of all the best politicians in this city and elsewhere, that he can’t carry three states, and ask him to be prepared to draw off immediately after the Chicago [Democratic] Convention. Nearly all agree that the Baltimore Platform is a mistake, that we have reached that point where we simply want to make one condition. That is, the restoration of the Union… . [Lincoln’s campaign manager, New York Times editor Henry] Raymond says Lincoln has gone up … . I understand from good authority that he has no hope of election.
The malcontents met at Opdyke’s house the next evening. Among them were newspaper editors Greeley, Parke Godwin, George Wilkes of Spirit of the Times, Theodore Tilton of The Independent, Senators Benjamin Wade and Charles Sumner, Representative Henry Winter Davis, Governor Andrew, and David Dudley
Field. They decided to call for a convention on September 28 in Cincinnati (Salmon Chase’s home town). Each of the two dozen men in attendance were given a stack of letters to deliver to prominent men of like mind across the country, inviting them to participate as delegates to the new convention. They promised to meet again on August 30, then they adjourned to go and spread their mischief.
Lincoln was painfully aware of the plans to unseat him. Seward had read Lincoln the Wade-Davis Manifesto on the evening it was published, and Lincoln immediately perceived the threat to his candidacy, saying, “I would like to know whether these men intend openly to oppose my election.—The document looks that way.” Carl Schurz, who talked with Lincoln during these days, described the President as profoundly saddened by this latest, surely fatal, betrayal. “He spoke,” wrote Schurz later, “as if he felt a pressing need to ease his heart by giving voice to the sorrowful thoughts distressing him. ‘They urge me with almost violent language,’ he said, ‘to withdraw from the contest, although I have been unanimously nominated, in order to make room for a better man. I wish I could. Perhaps some other man might do this business better than I. That is possible. I do not deny it. But I am here, and that better man is not here. And if I should step aside to make room for him, it is not at all sure—perhaps not even probable—that he would get here [the presidency]… . My withdrawal … might, and probably would, bring on a confusion worse confounded.’” Lincoln spoke, Schurz said, with “his sad eyes moist and his rugged features working strangely, as if under a very strong and painful emotion.”
Another friend, A. K. McClure, who also saw Lincoln in mid-August, said, “I spent an hour with him in the Executive Chamber, and I never saw him more dejected in my life. His face, always sad in repose, was then saddened until it became a picture of despair, and he spoke of the want of sincere and earnest support from the Republican leaders with unusual freedom.” Lincoln told his friend Noah Brooks mournfully, “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man.” In plain talk with General Schuyler Hamilton he admitted, “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten, but I do and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.”
Noah Brooks wrote, “In the memory of men who lived in Washington during the months of July and August, 1864, those days will appear to be the darkest of the many dark days through which passed the friends and lovers of the Federal Union.” Henry Raymond described the political extremes that crushed Lincoln between upper and nether millstones:
One denounces Mr. Lincoln because he did not abolish Slavery soon enough, another because he assumed to touch it at all. One refuses to vote for him because he keeps Mr. Blair in the Cabinet—another because he keeps somebody or anybody else. Frémont runs against him because he disregards the Constitution, and Wendell Phillips speaks against him because he recognizes that instrument at all. Some censure his lenient method of treating the people of the Southern States—others his barbarous and inhuman mode of carrying out the war. One set of politicians vilify him for not admitting the Southern States at once into the Union, and Wade and Davis with equal malignity, brand him as a usurper for proposing to admit them at all.
On August 23, Lincoln wrote out a written pledge at the lowest moment of his term. In it, he promised to work to sustain what he was sure would be a new incoming administration. He folded it, then passed it around and had each of his Cabinet members sign it on the outside, sight unseen. Inside, the bizarre document read:
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards. A. LINCOLN
* * *
“Mrs. North and Her Attorney.” Widow: “You see, Mr. Lincoln, we have failed utterly in our course of action. I want peace, and so, if you cannot effect an amicable arrangement I must put the case in other hands.”
With Lincoln brought to rock bottom by the terrible events of the summer, his friends looked wretchedly about for the thinnest of straws to grasp at. In that desperate search for a stratagem that would turn the tables and win the election, a serpent—in the form of his campaign manager, Henry Raymond— whispered a seduction into Lincoln’s ear. On August 22, Thurlow Weed foreshadowed the crisis in a letter to Seward from New York:
Mr. Raymond, who has just left me, says that unless some prompt and bold step be now taken, all is lost.
The People are wild for Peace. They are told that the President will only listen to terms of Peace on condition Slavery be “abandoned.”
… Mr Raymond thinks commissioners should be immediately sent to Richmond, offering to treat for Peace on the basis of Union. That something should be done and promptly done, to give the Administration a chance for its life, is certain.
That same day Henry Raymond sat down and wrote to Lincoln, holding out the shiny apple of temptation hinted at by Weed. He began with a plainspoken appraisal of the President’s broken-down prospects for reelection:
I feel compelled to drop you a line concerning the political condition of the Country as it strikes me. I am in active correspondence with your staunchest friends in every State and from them all I hear but one report. The tide is strongly against us. Hon. E. B. Washburne writes that “were an election to be held now in Illinois we should be beaten”. Mr. Cameron writes that Pennsylvania is against us. Gov. Morton writes that nothing but the most strenuous efforts can carry Indiana. [New York], according to the best information I can get, would go 50,000 against us to-morrow. And so of the rest.
Raymond pointed at the two causes of the President’s unpopularity: lack of military success, and “the impression in some minds, the fear and suspicion in others, that we are not to have peace in any event under this Administration until Slavery is abandoned. In some way or other the suspicion is widely diffused that we can have peace with Union if we would.”
Raymond suggested a shrewd counterstroke, a gambit that would silence the critics and pave the way for an impossible-seeming Republican triumph in November. The President, he said, should “make distinct proffers of peace to Davis … on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution,—all other questions to be settled in convention of the people of all the States.” That is, Lincoln should drop the slavery condition. This offer, Raymond pointed out, would put the onus squarely on the Confederate President. If Davis accepted, which he almost certainly would not, the Union would be restored without further loss of life. If he refused the offer, which he almost certainly would,
it would plant seeds of disaffection in the South, dispel all the delusions about peace that prevail in the North, silence the clamorous & damaging falsehoods of the opposition, take the wind completely out of the sails of the [Democrats], reconcile public sentiment to the War, the draft, & the tax as inevitable necessities, and unite the North as nothing since firing on Fort Sumter has hitherto done.
Such an offer could be done with “no abandonment of positions, no sacrifice of consistency,” Raymond said.
But this was shamefully untrue. What about the promise of freedom to millions of slaves still behind enemy lines? Raymond failed to mention that his plan would mean reneging on the Emancipation Proclamation, backsliding on the greatest moral step forward in American history, repudiating everything to which Lincoln had pledged his presidency since January 1, 1863, almost twenty months before, and undoing what was most holy about the Northern cause.
The pressure to yield to necessity was tremendous. The warring factions in Lincoln’s own party threatened to throw the election to the Democratic nominee, who was likely to call a halt to the struggle on inauguration day. If Lincoln did nothing and lost the election, he would also lose the ability to secure a lasting freedom for the slaves. Would his pragmatism in the service of the Union—always h
is guiding rule—now argue for renouncing his emancipation pledge, as Raymond’s scheme demanded?
The next day, Lincoln okayed the deal in a letter to Raymond. It read:
Executive Mansion,
Sir: Washington, August 24. 1864.
You will proceed forthwith and obtain, if possible, a conference for peace with Hon. Jefferson Davis, or any person by him authorized for that purpose.
You will address him in entirely respectful terms, at all events, and in any that may be indispensable to secure the conference.
At said conference you will propose, on behalf this government, that upon the restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.
Thus he put in writing his renunciation of the Emancipation Proclamation, his surrender of any claim of faithfulness to his slavery policy. It was Lincoln’s habit to look the Tempter square in the face, and as Lincoln wrote the letter, he saw him eye to eye.
Lincoln may have assured himself of a victory in November if he had followed Raymond’s advice. Davis would almost certainly have rejected peace with reunion as its condition, even as its only condition. But if Lincoln had sent the letter, if he had offered peace without freedom for all, he would have discarded the liberation of millions as just another political ploy that had outlived its usefulness. He would have reduced the greatest promise ever tendered by an American President to something like one of the broken treaties with the Native Americans. The war’s ennobling proclamation would have been thrown onto the ashheap of history, a victim of political expediency.
